I am working on an open shop scheduling problem and I need to find in each stap a maximum number of operations to be executed simultaneously where the lenght of the longest operation is minimized.
I did not try to apply Ford-Fulkerson min cut/max flow approach. I will try to solve it with this approch.
When we remove the k longest edges, we could not find always a matching of cardinality C.
In this paper " Classical and new heuristics for the open-shop problem: A computational evaluation. Christelle Guéret,Christian Prins 1998" (link below), it is said that " this problem can be solved by determining in G successive augmenting paths of maximum capacity (min-max paths). This can be achieved
using avariant of Dijsktra's algorithm for computing paths of maximum capacity,by basically replacing the operator `+' by `max'."
But this variante of Dijsktra's algorithm calculate an augmenting path where the lenght of the longest edge is minimized and this dont give always a matching where the lenght of the longest edge is minimized.
Exemple: x1 5 x2 6 x3 2 x4 4 x5 4 x6
x1 3 x2 7 x3 1 x4 4 x5 3 x6 (xi are vertices and the number between are the lenght of the edges)
So for the first augmenting path the lenght of the longest edge is minimized = 6 but for the matching ({ x1 ,x2}, { x3 ,x4}, { x5 ,x6}) is 5 however for the second augmenting path the lenght of the longest edge is 7 but for the matching ({ x1 ,x2}, { x3 ,x4}, { x5 ,x6}) is 3.